Lake Success

Gary Shteyngart is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Little Failure (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) and the novels Super Sad True Love Story (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Absurdistan, The Russian Debutante's Handbook (winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction) and Lake Success. His books regularly appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in thirty countries.Shteyngart, perhaps more than any American writer of his generation, is a natural. The wit and the immigrant's sense of heartbreak just seem to pour from himUproariously funny, bitingly satiric, yet also warm and big-heartedSPECTACULAR... More than just an artistic tour de force, Lake Success succeeds in saying something big about America today. By turns compassionate and mournful, wickedly satirical and ultimately aspirational. He captures what Philip Roth once called the 'indigenous American berserk'A novel in which comedy and pathos are exquisitely balanced

Gary Shteyngart hears America perfectly; its fatuity, its poignant lament, its boisterous self-loathing. Its heartbeat. Reading him sometimes makes me want to scream - with recognition and with pure hilarity

An unforgettable road trip through an America that's ominously divided, wildly diverse, and weirdly familiar. Gary Shteyngart writes with brutal honesty, virtuoso wit, and stubborn compassion for his deeply flawed but still somehow lovable charactersThe funniest book you'll read all year. A rollicking and zinger-filled road trip [and] a poignant tale of a man trying to outrace his problems. Epic, melancholy, staggeringly beautifulA trip through the American wasteland - from the people who have too little, to the people who have too much. Incredibly smart, incredibly funny, incredibly tragic, and therefore incredibly human, this is the perfect novel for these dysfunctional timesA novel reflecting with perfect comedy and horrible tragedy exactly what America feels like right this minute. I barked with laughter, at the same time as wincing in pain. Shteyngart has held up a mirror to American culture that is so accurate and so devastating... StupendousLake Success is a genial and warm-hearted book...a virtuoso piece of work, full of brilliant noticings...an unhysterical novel about a hysterical country at a hysterical time - the work of a novelist who believes in the power of fiction to illuminate out shared world.Shteyngart does slapstick as well as ever, but he stakes out new terrain in the expert way he develops his characters' pathos.... A stylish, big-hearted novel. Shteyngart made his name as a sharp satirist, and he'll undoubtedly widen his appeal with this effortThe satirical layering is masterful. Dark - so dark - yet delicious.Lake Success is undeniably enjoyable, rattling along with good jokes and sharp set pieces, and shot through with Shteyngart's good-natured melancholy.Referencing classic novels like The Great Gatsby and On the Road, Shteyngart whips up a novel that's part-satire and part-comedy of manners, humanising the super-rich while casting a critical eye over their world. It's funny, cutting, but above all compassionateShteyngart's comic energy is well deployed on the ridiculously rich, especially amid Trump's campaign and his election by, perhaps, many Greyhound riders.

*Over 50 Best of 2018 listings worldwide*

'Gary Shteyngart hears America perfectly; its fatuity, its poignant lament, its boisterous self-loathing. Its heartbeat. Reading him sometimes makes me want to scream - with recognition and with pure hilarity' - Richard Ford

A riotously satirical road trip through modern America from the brilliant author of Super Sad True Love Story and Absurdistan

Barry Cohen, master of the universe, has just had a very public meltdown involving a dinner party, an insider trading investigation and a $30,000 bottle of Japanese whisky. So he flees New York City, leaving behind his beautiful young wife and son, but remembering to bring his six favourite designer watches. Zig-zagging south through Trump's America on a Greyhound Bus pilgrimmage he is singularly unprepared for, Barry heads to Texas - to find his old college girlfriend and, with her, a shot at a second chance...

Lake Success marries the trademark Shteyngart wit with an astonishing emotional resonance, capturing the vivid eccentricity and contradictions of America right now while speaking to the universal human experience of love, belonging, and the pursuit of happiness.

'A trip through the American wasteland - from the people who have too little, to the people who have too much. Incredibly smart, incredibly funny, incredibly tragic, and therefore incredibly human, this is the perfect novel for these dysfunctional times' - Nathan Hill

'The funniest book you'll read all year. A rollicking and zinger-filled road trip [that] sneakily deepens into a poignant tale of a man trying to outrace his problems.I was utterly floored' - Maria Semple

'Stupendous... Reflecting with perfect comedy and horrible tragedy exactly what America feels like right this minute... I barked with laughter at the same time as wincing in pain' Elizabeth Gilbert